With Mark Hudon posting about two very useful books (both of which I have since bought) I thought it might be interesting to hear what folks have been reading during the winter season in front of the fire, a cup o Hood River Coffee in hand of course.
Let us know what yall are reading in regards to photography or what processing skills you have been honing/improving/learning!
So what have I been reading/doing? I've been working on honing/improving my skills in Pixmantec RAW Shooter Premium. It is a RAW converter that I find quite pleasing to use. Yes more so than Adobe RAW converter. I find the user interface to be much more intuitive and the results I get to be better than I get from Adobe RAW Converter.
The Premium version costs $89.95 but there is a FREE version with somewhat less features but still VERY useful. It is RAW Shooter Essentials. So if you are curious go ahead and try Essentials first since it's free.
One other item sold by Pixmantec is their Color Engine. It has prebuilt color profiles for most of the current DLSR's. I advise looking into that for those who choose to use either of the above RAW converters from Pixmantec.
Quite often with using RAW Shooter Premium I am able to minimize my processing in Photoshop to just sizing and sharpening for well exposed images.
Oh the other thing I've been fiddling with is PhotoKit Sharpener. I've used Focal Blade which I like and Plugins from Fred Miranda which I liked even better but niether have the depth and flexibility that PhotoKit Sharpener has.
This tool takes sharpening to a whole new level with many different ways to both sharpen and/or blur an image with either a global application similar to other sharpening tools or with defined brushes to selectively apply either sharpening or blurring.
Anyhoo I'm getting all wordy so I'll stop here. Let us know what you have been doing with this winter's down time and how you are expanding your knowledge of photography!!
Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS2 and also Photoshop CS Artistry. I found the Camera Raw book is something I keep going back to and using and refreshing my skills with.
Discussion
6 repliesWith Mark Hudon posting about two very useful books (both of which I have since bought) I thought it might be interesting to hear what folks have been reading during the winter season in front of the fire, a cup o Hood River Coffee in hand of course.
Let us know what yall are reading in regards to photography or what processing skills you have been honing/improving/learning!
So what have I been reading/doing? I've been working on honing/improving my skills in Pixmantec RAW Shooter Premium. It is a RAW converter that I find quite pleasing to use. Yes more so than Adobe RAW converter. I find the user interface to be much more intuitive and the results I get to be better than I get from Adobe RAW Converter.
It can be found here:
http://www.pixmantec.com
The Premium version costs $89.95 but there is a FREE version with somewhat less features but still VERY useful. It is RAW Shooter Essentials. So if you are curious go ahead and try Essentials first since it's free.
One other item sold by Pixmantec is their Color Engine. It has prebuilt color profiles for most of the current DLSR's. I advise looking into that for those who choose to use either of the above RAW converters from Pixmantec.
Quite often with using RAW Shooter Premium I am able to minimize my processing in Photoshop to just sizing and sharpening for well exposed images.
Oh the other thing I've been fiddling with is PhotoKit Sharpener. I've used Focal Blade which I like and Plugins from Fred Miranda which I liked even better but niether have the depth and flexibility that PhotoKit Sharpener has.
The website can be found here:
http://www.pixelgenius.com
This tool takes sharpening to a whole new level with many different ways to both sharpen and/or blur an image with either a global application similar to other sharpening tools or with defined brushes to selectively apply either sharpening or blurring.
Anyhoo I'm getting all wordy so I'll stop here. Let us know what you have been doing with this winter's down time and how you are expanding your knowledge of photography!!
Looking at Photographs : 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art
And of course the manual to my new D200...
T.
A very useful resource.. in particular, the black and white tutorials..
Tomas
The level of photos presented is extremely high and inspiring... I've learned a lot from you all, so thank you.